Chatham University

CAMPUS COMMUNITY PROFILE: RACHEL CHUNG, PH.D.

January 19, 2015newseditor

Title: Director of Business Programs

Before joining Chatham in 2013, while at Carlow University, Dr. Chung was featured on a BBC World News story about Twins Days Festival, the world’s largest gathering for twins and multiples. At the festival, Dr. Chung and her team gathered data from more than 200 pairs of twins, seeking to determine whether there was a genetic basis for online behavior. Originally from Taiwan, Dr. Chung now lives in the North Hills. Her personal interests include cooking and hunting for dinosaurs with her son Connor.

What do you think about the integration of graduate and undergraduate business programs?

I should start by saying that our programs have always been administratively integrated. Now the academics will be integrated too. I think there will be some very positive changes. Take our Marketing faculty, for example. They used to teach only undergraduates, and our grad students were taught by professionals working in the field. But having a professor teach the graduate class means that he or she can connect the dots for the students. The professors keep track of industry trends, because it’s their research area and they’re immersed in it. Chatham’s MBA is an academics program, and we need to have Ph.D.s there. And it’s good for them, too. It means that they don’t have to teach so many classes outside their field of expertise. If you’re enrolled in a class, you really want the instructor to keep track of what’s changing in the field, and no one can keep track of everything that’s going on in six different fields. It’s just not possible. We’re also excited about increased opportunities for interaction between our graduate and undergraduate students.

Is there anything in place to promote that interaction?

Yes, and we’re working on developing more. For example, we used to hold separate mixers for undergraduate and graduate students. Now we’re combining them, and holding the mixer from 4:30pm, when most undergraduates are likely to be ending classes, to 6:30pm, close to when many graduate students begin their classes. I’d say it’s been very successful.

We’re also working with Sean McGreevey (Assistant Dean for Career Development) on opportunities to have some graduate-undergraduate mentoring. The mixers are a great mechanism for helping mentoring to happen. Students don’t have to coordinate their schedules, they can say “I’ll just meet you at the mixer!”